PC1 - Flooding and Composure

The largest single direction in the adapter cloud is not a Big Five factor but a blend - cosine +0.82 with Agreeableness and -0.70 with Conscientiousness - running from emotional flooding to procedural composure.

PC1 - Flooding and Composure

The first principal component of the double-centred Gram over the 134 stage-one adapters. Construction and the four circulating variance spectra are on PCA, the scree curve and the two nulls and Weight-space geometry of the 134-adapter zoo; a component is a weighted merge of adapters and can be steered.

Variance share 0.12668915056443317 (qwen35/analysis/blog_data.json#viz.var[0], the 134-trait sketch basis the blog page's map uses; the exact 134-trait figure is 12.4946% and the 100-marker figure 13.362%).

Cosines with the named Big Five axes

qwen35/analysis/pc_loadings.json#pcs.PC1.cos:

The blog page: "PC1 is not a direction outside the Big Five. It is a blend: 0.82 with Agreeableness and 0.70 with Conscientiousness in the opposite direction - warm-and-unsystematic at one end, cold-and-assertive at the other."

Loadings

#pcs.PC1.pos: unsystematic, pleasant, effeminate, sympathetic, agreeable. #pcs.PC1.neg: unsympathetic, cold, unemotional, assertive, insensitive.

Eigenvector sign is arbitrary, so these are the two ends of one axis, not a ranking.

Distance from the lexicon

qwen35/analysis/direction_gaps.json#PC1: 49.36644445483566 degrees to its nearest adjective, unsympathetic, with cold (51.54) and unemotional (51.57) next. That is closer to a word than any two adjectives are to each other (median nearest-neighbour 65.6 degrees, closest pair 54.0) - see Where no word goes - the hole and the alien direction.

Steering

qwen35/analysis/blog_data.json#replication.PC1: judged as Conscientiousness, slope2 = +1.0041666666666667, sel2 = 1.9165009940357849, slope4 = +0.6359126984126984, sel4 = 1.9738260200153963.

qwen35/analysis/qual_pc.json label:

Affective flooding vs. procedural composure. Negative: giddy, exclamatory, childlike over-excitement with no plan and no judgement; positive: terse, documented, professionally regulated task execution. Interpretable only over -1..+2; both extremes degenerate.

Degeneracy (blog_data.json#degen.PC1, the fraction of the 24 responses that loop): 1.0 at alpha -4, 0.7083333333333334 at -2, 0.041666666666666664 at -1, 0 at 0 / +1 / +2, 0.7083333333333334 at +4. So the usable range is -1 to +2, as the qualitative note says. Transcripts: Steering the base model along weight-space directions.

Status

Current. qwen35/direction_pages/PC1.html is historical.

Related: PCA, the scree curve and the two nulls, axis_Agreeableness (the named Agreeableness axis), axis_Conscientiousness (the named Conscientiousness axis), FA_Competence (Competence), FA_Warmth (Warmth / prosociality), Steering the base model along weight-space directions.